Nick Kristof traveled to Venezuela and reported on the humanitarian crisis there:

The hard question for Americans: Do our sanctions, intended to undermine the regime, actually make it more likely that babies like Daisha die?

Kristof’s column rightly calls attention to the worsening crisis in Venezuela, and he asks some of the right questions. Americans do need to ask themselves why their government is bringing more misery and death to an already suffering population. Sanctions don’t just make it more likely that malnourished and sick children die. They directly contribute to those deaths by reducing the availability of food and medicine. How could it be otherwise when the most common result of economic sanctions is increased hardship for the civilian population? This happens so consistently in enough different places that we cannot claim that we don’t know it will happen when our government imposes these sanctions. Sanctions that impede humanitarian work in North Korea have reportedly contributed directly to thousands of preventable deaths. Iran sanctions cut off supplies of essential medicines that cancer patients and other ailing Iranians need for their treatment. The same thing has been reported in Venezuela.

The questions he asks are good ones, but Kristof needs a better answer than “we need to rethink our strategy.” Merely rethinking the strategy suggests that we agree with the goal of regime change and differ only as to the means. We need to repudiate the pursuit of forcing regime change in other countries. We need to challenge the assumptions behind the blanket use of economic warfare against whole countries. We need to reject the idea that sanctions designed to cripple an economy and starve a nation of necessities are a legitimate policy tool. In one case after another, we see that the poor and the sick are the hardest hit by the effects of sanctions, and we also see that the government targeted with these sanctions doesn’t make any concessions. It would be wrong to throttle a civilian population with economic strangulation in any case, but to do this without achieving anything else is destructive cruelty for its own sake.

Kristof continues:

The best thing for the Venezuelan people would be a new government. But sanctions have failed to drive Maduro from power, inflicting anguish instead on vulnerable Venezuelans.

Ten months have passed since the U.S. threw its public support behind Guaido, and almost six months have passed since the failed coup attempt. How many more months of inflicting economic pain on tens of millions of people will there be before our government acknowledges that their regime change policy is a destructive failure? When have sanctions ever brought down a government run by someone like Maduro? Why would we expect it to succeed? These are all questions that a competent administration would have asked and carefully answered at the start of the year. Instead we have watched the knee-jerk use of coercive measures to try to force an outcome that sanctions cannot achieve.

It is true that Maduro and his allies bear much of the responsibility for wrecking the economy, but that makes the imposition of sweeping sanctions that much more outrageous. Venezuela was already suffering from economic and humanitarian crises, and instead of seeking to aid the population or provide some of them with refuge our government attacked them with more hardship and deprivation. The argument against broad, sector-wide sanctions on Venezuela or Iran or any other country is not that these countries would be prospering in the absence of sanctions, but that these sanctions are purely destructive weapons wielded to inflict collective punishment. In Venezuela, sanctions are being employed in pursuit of an elusive goal of regime change, and that means that ordinary people are being cut off from medicine and food because our government has decided to force a change in the political leadership of another country.

Kristof floats the possibility of an oil-for-food program at the end of the column. That would be an improvement over the current situation, but it would be even better if the U.S. halted its economic warfare on Venezuela entirely. That wouldn’t remedy Venezuela’s crisis, but it would stop making things worse.